Books: Dream into Nightmare

If the run of ex-Communist novelists can be believed, the only good
Communists are dead Communists, and the man who destroyed them is
Stalin. Most of them died because they failed to make the tricky turns
on the tortuous slalom course of the party line. Some of them didn't
even see the turns coming up. A few saw them but preferred destruction
to further writhing and twisting.

The Burned Bramble belongs in the select company of those novels which
have best explained why and how the good Communists become dead ones
(others : Arthur Koestler's Darkness...